Ptolemy: Egyptian cartographer whose Almagest explained the curious motions of the stars and planets by assuming that the earth was at the centre of the universe.Įcliptic: The path of the earth's yearly cycle.Īxis: The imaginary straight line about which a body revolves. eg: the location of a planet at its greatest distance from the earth. ' The Revolutions' was placed on the Roman Church's index of forbidden books in 1616, finally being removed more than three hundred years later, in 1835.Īpogee: The point in the orbit of an object farthest from the point of reference. In due course, Tycho Brahe's precise observations and Johannes Kepler's better mathematics showed that the Copernican model was the right one. Perhaps most importantly, he had already been denounced by the Lutheran church, so it behoved the more powerful Roman church, its bitter rival, to give succor to anyone who had enraged their enemies. Furthermore, Copernicus was slightly wrong - he assumed that the planets (which actually move in elipses) must move in circles, for no other reason than circles are the very nicest shape - so astronomers couldn't verify his ideas by actual observation. Partly this was because Nicolaus' literary agent, himself a divine, added a very unauthorised introduction explaining that the new theory was merely to be taken as a convenient fiction to simplify calculations, not as the truth. But, at least initially, they supported this new and bold idea. The religious guardians of tradition ought to have been shocked, as they were later with Galileo. We humans, and our little home, were no longer the centre of everything. The earth and its solitary moon had been demoted from centre of the Universe to the status of a mere, very ordinary, planet. But the strength of his exposition of it came as an enormous psychological shock to European culture. His idea that the earth is not at the centre of the universe was not, as he himself is at pains to point out, a new one. This polymath studied, not only astronomy, but mathematics, classics, law, and medicine at Krakow and in Italy, and found a job with his uncle, the bishop of Varmia. INTRODUCTION TO The Revolutions of the Celestial OrbsĬopernicus was born in Torun on the Vistula in Poland. Wikipedia - Full Text - Print Edition: ISBN 1573920355 Squashed down to read in about 25 minutes Squashed Philosophers - Copernicus - The Revolutions
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